Thursday, August 18, 2011

Tony Scott to remake The Wild Bunch?

Deadline has the exclusive:

[Tony] Scott is in talks with Warner Bros to direct a reboot of the 1969 Sam Peckinpah-directed The Wild Bunch. This film becomes one of three or so that Scott is most eager to direct as his follow-up to the Denzel Washington-Chris Pine action film Unstoppable.

Scott's next assignment will be Hell's Angels, though its timing will depend on whether he gets the actor he wants to play gang leader Sonny Barger. I'm told that he wants Jeff Bridges. They've not met face to face yet, because Bridges is right now touring his self-titled musical album that he recorded after he won the Oscar playing Bad Blake in Crazy Heart. Once Bridges gets back to film work, he's book to star with Ryan Reynolds in Universal's R.I.P.D. and the Warner Bros/Legendary Pictures The Seventh Son. If Scott has his heart set on Bridges and the actor says yes, Hell's Angels won't get underway until next spring or later. Fox 2000's Hell's Angels is set around the Laughlin riots of 2001 when the Angels were caught up in a war with rival gang The Mongols. The drama revolves around a friendship that develops between Barger and a young drifter mechanic with a gift for fixing motorcycles. The script is in by Scott Frank, who did numerous rewrites of an earlier draft by Stephen Gaghan.

Scott is also making a high priority of the reinvention of his 1986 Tom Cruise hitTop Gun. I'm not sure where this leaves the remake of Potzdamer Platz and an adaptation of the John Grisham novel The Associate, two films which were on Scott's front burner.

The original The Wild Bunch was about an aging group of outlaws that try for one last score on the Texas-Mexico border in 1913, as the Old West changes around them. The original starred William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan and Warren Oates. The studio has tried for years to get this going, once getting a script from Training Day's David Ayer. It's early days on the project, but Scott and producer Jerry Weintraub have a take for the movie and Helgeland will draft it. Scott is repped by CAA.